It is as though someone has drilled peep holes into the walls of emergency rooms, operating rooms and doctors' offices. I can't look away.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Crossing the Line (or you're not getting my Diet Coke)

Study: Diet soda linked to heart risks.

Dammit. You medical types have gone too far now. It took me years to develop a taste for those sweet, delicious, thirst-quenching chemicals. What am I supposed to do now? Drink water? Yeah, right, like that's really going to happen.

Sorry, I'm a bit prejudiced but, I have long detested sodas (high fructose corn syrup,can you say diabetes?)of any kind-didn't you SEE what Coke did to the nail?? Then add some chemical "sweetner" that may or may not be linked to cancer and now your soda is a time bomb! Flavored waters might be okay, but just try and find one without chemical (or chemically altered) sweetner or high fructose corn syrup. Step AWAY from the diet soda Ma'am,nice and easy now and no one gets hurt....

I'm not a soda drinker. But I wouldn't lose any sleep over this. I'm sure there is some other factor that makes those who drink soda (or pop, if you come from the Rochester, NY area) prone to "metabolic syndrome." I would believe it if it was only people who drank many sodas a day. But it was even those who drank just one soda! Surely there are other factors involved here.

Drinking water is bad for your health. There are all types of chemicals that end up in our water supply, but just not enough to hurt us when we drink the stuff. Screw it! If I'm going to die from bad chemicals, those chemicals are going to be sweet and tasty.

I have come to the conclusion that living leads to death, and that if you fund your study by the "right" group, you can get it to conclude whatever you want. Leave my only true vice - Diet Coke - alone!~RWS

Thanks Seasprout. I dropped by your blog last night but I was so tired and sleepy, I couldn't even leave a comment. I will prepare a proper response later, but until then, thank you for the nice things you said.

understand, dear friend, that to eke out these statistically significant findings these studies have to include thousands of patients.

in order for a finding to bear significance, out of 1000 patients fifty need to be found with a positive correlation.

now, add to this the fact that you absolutely can not control for all the variables involved. also, having dismissed this tidbit out of hand when i first heard of it i didn't pay attention to whether this was a human study (probably not) or a murine (mouse) study (probably).

so, what probably happened was that the mice were fed a normal diet and one group got water and the other diet coke.

they probably studied tens of thousands of mice and some got cancer and therefore the correlation.

personally, and this may come as a shock, i believe that everyone eventually DIES and if you are raising your risk of cancer by some fraction of a percentage by drinking diet drinks AND you like them then drink away. personally, i prefer beer.